The good news is I have survived The Plague.

The bad news is I had way too much stuff to catch up after being “down for the count” for a week. Yikes!

So that means I’ve been running like a chicken with a chopped off head all week. I’m behind in a load of stuff. Laundry? EEEK it’s gonna eat me! Groceries? Thank goodness for the stockpile! You get the picture. Forget blogs!!

So here I am to talk about this week’s eating. First off, I thought I’d tell you more about the boys and their cooking endeavors.

My boys signed up for a really cool summer camp at a college in southwest VA. Joram, my little budding chef, put down that he wanted to do the Cooking 101 class. I am fully supportive of this. I am thinking about finding him some kid oriented cooking classes. Maybe later this summer or fall.

Yesterday I had a ton of stuff going on. So I’m going to confess I did a bad thing. I turned on the Food Network, sat Joram in front of it and told him to have at it while Caramon worked on a merit badge. Joram wrote down several recipes and he got real excited about so many things. He knows all sorts of new cooking techniques like mincing and saute.

He also noticed my stickie note on my desktop. I keep a “stickie note” on there – it’s part of the software. It’s got my menu plan and I update it. Well, he noticed our Saturday meal and got super excited. The good news is he has loads of new ideas and so I think I’m going to let him have a field day. He gets to plan some great meals for us and make up a shopping list. We could have some real fun with that and he can learn budgeting as well as everything else. Maybe not a whole week, maybe a whole week. I don’t know. What do you think?

The next thing I wanted to mention was that I DID get my precious BBQ chicken. Woot! I managed to get to the grocery store on Friday and I just bought one of those precooked chickens. Lucky me there was a fantastic sale! The chicken was fully cooked and ready to go for 6.99 and came with a free bag of veggies, a water, and a tub of sherbet! Woot!

That’s what we ate on Friday. Then I went and picked up my husband. Here’s the problem, now Sir Megabyte was home and he’s really anti chicken. So what can I do? Well I told him tough noogies and he could suffer. Guess what I found out? That dang thing made three meals!! And I even had a little extra chicken for some lunch! Probably could have gotten a full four meals out of one of those precooked birds! Not too shabby!

So what did I make? MMMM! I made Chicken N Dumplings on Monday. And Tuesday we got our homemade chicken noodle soup.

The boys got to learn a good lesson. My father-in-law has been working on teaching me! We go there every Thanksgiving and get just a huge spread of yummy food. And he always makes the most tasty yummy turkey noodle soup. So I decided to do it – just with the chicken!

So we got to go over deboning a chicken. The boys got a kick out of that. Then we boiled that in some water and made our very own homemade broth! The boys were so excited!!! They’ve never done that before and thought it was great! I’ve done it before, but not with a carcass. Unless you count helping my FIL last Thanksgiving with the turkey.

So we made our very own homemade broth. This meant we could have broth for chicken n dumplings as well as for our soup!!

Verdict on the dumplings – YUM!!!! OK, so I’ve done that before. So I knew it would pay off.

Verdict on the soup – Was OK. I think I missed something. It was just missing that punch. This could just be me. You don’t know. This turkey soup my FIL makes is PHENOMENAL. Absolutely FANTASTIC. Maybe if I wasn’t spoiled by that, this would have been great. I mean it was lightyears better than anything you’d get out of a can. But, it wasn’t up to the turkey soup level. I just think I missed out on just the right spice or something. It happens. It was still yummy. We still have some in the fridge for lunch tomorrow! Yeah, I made a ton and a half. If I’d been smart I’d have just bagged some for a future dinner. But why do that when we could have soup for lunch? Break up the sandwhich humdrum!

Besides, if I tried to do the soup again that soon, my husband would probably beat me upside the head with the noodles. As it was, he tolerated the dumplings and just was blargh over the soup. (OK, in regards to the dumplings he went back for seconds but said it was “tolerable”. Seems to me someone liked it but just doesn’t want to admit he liked something with CHICKEN! HEHE)

Tonight we ate with some friends in a rush before going to a double Eagle Court of Honour. It was just one of those days. Welcome to my last three days!

So you see we had Chicken n Dumplings and Chicken Noodle Soup. Here’s the rest of the week:

Thursday: Eggs (We have a friend with free range chickens and she gave us a dozen. I wanna use them! MMMM!)

Friday: Freezer Meal – Shepherd’s Pie

Saturday: (This is Joram’s excitement) Homemade Pizza Pockets. (He’s so stoked! We’re even making the crust from scratch!)

Sunday: I have another freezer meal left but I’m feeling guilty over the chicken. I might let my husband put in a request. Or maybe I’ll talk to Joram. HEHE

I’m so busy, I’m not sure I’ll get to the grocery store on Friday. If I don’t, there’s no way I can make it till Monday. So next week’s menu plan probably won’t make it till Tuesday, but we’ll see. I need to talk to the J-man!

What are you guys eating?

–Lady O